Uh Oh! Stoutcat Disagrees with Krauthammer

Well, only in one small part, actually. The vast majority of his superb column on NRO today is absolutely spot on. The current health reform bill is indeed “irredeemable” and…

“…it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

Worse, they are packed into a monstrous package without any regard to each other. The only thing linking these changes — such as the 118 new boards, commissions, and programs — is political expediency. Each must be able to garner just enough votes to pass. There is not even a pretense of a unifying vision or conceptual harmony.”

But: Mr. Krauthammer makes one small but very important statement with which I disagree. He begins the end of his column with this statement:

“Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative.”

Is it? Why?

If insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative, why isn’t ensuring food for those who can’t afford it also a moral imperative? After all, people can die from starvation, whereas a cold, fever, or flu may bring you down for a while, but it generally won’t kill you.

What about homes? Homeless people die of exposure; why not make homes for all a moral imperative as well?

No, the moral imperative is to make sure that the uninsured have access to the healthcare they need. But mandating that for-profit insurance companies must cover them is akin to mandating that grocery stores must give away groceries for free to the hungry; or that banks must give home loans to those who cannot afford to pay mortgages. Oh wait, we all saw how well that worked out, didn’t we?

Making sure that those who cannot afford healthcare coverage have access to good healthcare may in fact be a moral imperative. Insuring the uninsured whether they want it or not, whether they can afford it or not, whether the insurance companies want to or not, is most decidedly not a moral imperative.

Stoutcat,
You caught Krauthammer in what seems to be a common mistake these days, namely allowing the political opposition to set the agenda, and then trying to fault their methods or policies. Instead, as you pointed out, we should stay on message that this whole “health care” issue is completely fraudulent. Yeah, we are for equal opportunity, equal access, but equal outcome? No way. First of all, it is impossible, secondly it is unconstitutional, thirdly it violates virtually all of the principles of freedom and liberty that our founders envisioned.

Your question regarding the ensuring of food, etc. is a rational retort to an irrational idea. Those kinds of logical pleas almost always land on deaf ears, because the proponents of grandiose socialistic schemes are either guilty of harboring ideas of personal aggrandizement or simply emotional followers of the former. It’s kinda like the problem between radical Islam and the Judeo-Christian believers. How many instances can you recall of Jihadists being talked out of their insanity by mere words? Not many, I’ll wager. Same with the libs.

Anyway, my point is that, if there is a majority in this country that have bought into the “everybody should be covered” mantra, then we have lost a lot more than just one policy argument.

As I said once before on this blog, we aren’t the United States anymore, because we aren’t united. Of all the problems that we face as a country, it seems to me that THAT is the one BIG one. We have allowed the combined influences of liberal controlled media and academia, and rampant, uncontrolled immigration to bring us to this point where we can’t find a consensus on just about anything. Is it any wonder then, that we are literally being torn apart from within and without. All of us alive today in this country have seen the last best days of the last best hope for the world.

Get ready for something similar to what happened in Russia after the fall of Communism. Nature, after all, abhors a vacuum. Since there will be precious little opportunity for the masses, those who are strong, clever, ruthless, and corrupt will rise to the top. I fully expect that we will see plenty of those who will want to show the Russians that they are not the only ones who can turn criminal enterprise into big business.

All it takes is for great numbers of us to stop having any regard for the law, to stop respecting those that make them, enforce them, or adjudicate them. See any of that happening, yet?

Tom, you make some good points, but it may be that the country is too far gone for “staying on message” to have the effect we’re hoping it will.

And you’re right, we aren’t united any more. This nation, which was once the great melting pot of proud Americans has become a divisive, culturally fragmented, me-centered haven of hyphenated-Americans, brought about by those twin scourges of common sense, “political correctness”and “diversity”.

Given the massive entitlement programs we already have in place, and the ones looming on the horizon, it’s my opinion that we’re teetering on the edge of the “bread and circuses”, and it could go either way. Either we as a nation regain our common sense, or we’re doomed.